The topic of terrorism on Yahoo! Answers: questions, answers and users’ anonymity
| Date | 19 December 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2019-0204 |
| Pages | 1-16 |
| Published date | 19 December 2019 |
| Author | Alton Y.K. Chua,Snehasish Banerjee |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
The topic of terrorism on Yahoo!
Answers: questions, answers and
users’anonymity
Alton Y.K. Chua
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and
Snehasish Banerjee
The York Management School, University of York, York, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of community question answering sites (CQAs) on
the topic of terrorism. Three research questions are investigated: what are the dominant themes reflected in
terrorism-related questions? How do answer characteristics vary with question themes? How does users’
anonymity relate to question themes and answer characteristics?
Design/methodology/approach –Data include 300 questions that attracted 2,194 answers on the
community question answering Yahoo! Answers. Content analysis was employed.
Findings –The questions reflected the community’s information needs ranging from the life of extremists to
counter-terrorism policies. Answers were laden with negative emotions reflecting hate speech and
Islamophobia, making claims that were rarely verifiable. Users who posted sensitive content generally
remained anonymous.
Practical implications –This paper raises awareness of how CQAs are used to exchange information
about sensitive topics such as terrorism. It calls for governments and law enforcement agencies to collaborate
with major social media companies to develop a process for cross-platform blacklisting of users and content,
as well as identifying those who are vulnerable.
Originality/value –Theoretically, it contributes to the academic discourse on terrorism in CQAs by
exploring the type of questions asked, and the sort of answers they attract. Methodologically, the paper
serves to enrich the literature around terrorism and social media that has hitherto mostly drawn data from
Facebook and Twitter.
Keywords Community question answering, Terrorism, Online anonymity, Answer characteristics,
Online hate speech, Question themes
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
1.1 Background
The threat of terrorism has become disturbingly unpredictable. The territorial demise of
Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria –referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
(Dearden, 2014) –was supposed to herald an era of peace. Instead, militants who fled from
the collapsed caliphate have returned home or emerged elsewhere only to launch more
attacks. For example, ISIS fighters flushed out of the middle east carried out suicide attacks
in Surabaya (Suzuki, 2018) and Sri Lanka (Bond and Findlay, 2019). Clearly, terrorism
remains a persistent challenge worldwide.
While portrayed as a threat to society and human civilization by mainstream media,
terrorists sell terrorism as freedom fighting via social networking sites and private
messaging platforms (Klausen, 2015). However, the actual workings of terrorism are largely
shrouded in secrecy. For the curious, a convenient avenue to turn to is the community
question answering sites (CQAs).
CQAs are social media platforms where users ask questions, answer those submitted by
others, and have the option to evaluate responses using UpVotes and DownVotes
(Agichtein et al., 2008; Roy et al., 2018). They serve as a continually growing repository of
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 72 No. 1, 2020
pp. 1-16
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-08-2019-0204
Received 20 August 2019
Revised 25 October 2019
Accepted 28 November 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2050-3806.htm
1
The topic of
terrorism on
Yahoo!
Answers
topic-specific information. Over the years, scholars have studied a variety of topics on CQAs
that run the gamut from civic education (Keynan and Lazar, 2017) and eating habits (Bowler
et al., 2012) to non-suicidal self-injury (Lewis et al., 2012).
However, the topic of terrorism on CQAs has yet to receive scholarly attention.
This research gap is important to address for two reasons. First, terrorism has entered the
main line of discourse in CQAs. A search conducted by one of the authors on the keyword
“terrorism”in the archives of Yahoo! Answers returned 10,126 results in October 2019. Some
users inquired about the genesis of terrorist groups (e.g. “Who exactly created ISIS?”) while
others were keen to understand terrorists’underlying motives (e.g. “Why are terrorist’s
[sic] trying to hurt the beautiful Paris, France?”).
Second, in response to thecall to study terrorism in the context of informationtechnology
use (Hua and Bapna,2012; Hua et al., 2018), some works haveexamined how terrorists exploit
social media platforms such as Facebook (McKeown, 2017) and Twitter (Klausen, 2015).
However, the heightened interest in terrorism on CQAs notwithstanding, terrorism-related
community question answering (CQA) content has yet to be systematically explored.
1.2 Objective and research questions
The objective of this paper is to investigate the topic of terrorism on CQAs, and in particular,
Yahoo! Answers. Specifically, the following three research questions (RQs) will guide the
investigation:
RQ1. What are the dominant themes reflected in terrorism-related questions?
The intent is to uncover salient terrorism-related information needs of the online
community. Using inductive content analysis (Keynan and Lazar, 2017; Miles et al., 2013),
the dominant themes of the questions will be identified. While some questions are
anticipated to be fairly innocuous, others could be sensitive or even abusive, opening the
door for impassioned answers presented single-sidedly ( Jane, 2014; March and
Marrington, 2019):
RQ2. How do answer characteristics vary with question themes?
This RQ focuses on the characteristics of answers attracted by each question theme
identified in RQ1. Specifically, answers will be analyzed in terms of four dimensions:
directness, emotiveness, verifiability and community approval. Directness assesses whether
answers accurately respond to-the-point (Fichman, 2011). Emotiveness indicates the use of
affect-laden tone (Chua and Banerjee, 2013) that can stoke emotions to foster extreme
attitudes and beliefs. Verifiability refers to the provision of references as a way to support
the arguments (Fichman, 2011). Community approval is measured using UpVotes and
DownVotes cast by CQA users (Agichtein et al., 2008):
RQ3. How does users’anonymity relate to question themes and answer characteristics?
Known as the online disinhibition effect, users tend to loosen social restrictions and vent out
suppressed thoughts when they can be anonymous (Suler, 2004). This explains why
controversial and sensitive online messages are often submitted anonymously (Mondal
et al., 2017). For a topic such as terrorism, it would be insightful to uncover patterns of users’
anonymity across different question themes and answer characteristics.
The paper is significant on three fronts. Theoretically, it initiates a new line of academic
discourse focusing on the topic of terrorism in CQAs by exploring the type of questions
asked, and the sort of answers they attract. Shedding light on the degree to which users
conceal their identity when discussing terrorism, the paper expands the scholarly
understanding of disinhibition by identifying two shades of online anonymity, namely pure
anonymity and quasi-anonymity.
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AJIM
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